Category: Scam

SINGAPORE – One of two masterminds of a scam involving false quotations and fictitious job requests obtained more than $4.2 million in the ruse that defrauded a company of more than $10 million. On Monday (Nov 12), renovation firm manager Tan Aik Gee, 54, from Ying Xin Services was sentenced to 11 years’ jail and a fine of $900,000 after pleading guilty to 25 charges of cheating construction services company United Engineers Limited (UEL) and five counts of taking his ill-gotten gains from Singapore to Indonesia. The court heard that 186…

SINGAPORE – A syndicate involved in almost $20 million worth of Internet love scam was crippled in a joint international operation involving officers from Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong. Eight Internet love scam cases reported in Singapore, involving at least $450,000 dollars, were solved as a result of the joint operation. The operation was carried out in Malaysia between Friday and Sunday, the Singapore Police Force said in a statement on Monday (Oct 22). Sixteen Malaysians, two Nigerian men and one woman from China were arrested for their suspected involvement in…

SINGAPORE – Beware of messages asking you for details to “unlock” your bank account. Bank customers are the latest targets of phishing scams, the police said in a statement on Tuesday morning (Oct 2). Several reports on text messages targeting such users were received by the police between Sept 27 and 30, the statement said. Victims were deceived into providing their Internet banking details on phishing websites after responding to the messages. The messages claimed to be sent by the bank in order to “unlock” their banking accounts. A new…

SINGAPORE – The increase in crime for the first half of this year is not cause for concern, but it is a call for people to be more careful, particularly when transacting online, Home Affairs and Law Minister K. Shanmugam said on Saturday (Aug 25). “If you look at the statistics, the rise is mainly due to Internet scams… and it’s not easy to deal with because often they’re borderless and in a different jurisdiction,” he said on the sidelines of a community event in Yishun. “The main thing we…

SINGAPORE: Singapore police said on Tuesday (Aug 21) they have recovered more than S$27 million linked to one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in China, which saw 1.15 million investors cheated out of 38 billion yuan (S$7 billion). Ezubao, once China’s biggest peer-to-peer lending platform, folded in 2016 after it turned out to be an online scam that concocted fake projects to attract investment and pocketed funds instead of passing them to borrowers to generate returns. In May that year, the Singapore police’s Commercial Affairs Department assisted Chinese authorities during their investigation into the scam by conducting asset…

SINGAPORE – A Singaporean man, who allegedly cheated more than 80 people of nearly $100,000 in a haj pilgrimage tour scam, was charged in court on Friday (Aug 17). Fahrorazi Sohoi, 47, who runs a local tour agency, is alleged to have told a customer that for $1,550, he could organise the pilgrimage for him, and for him to do so as a VIP, at the invitation of the Saudi Arabian Embassy, according to court documents. Earlier reports had said that Fahrorazi’s alleged victims were supposed to depart for the…

JAKARTA — A high-profile Indonesian husband and wife have been sentenced to prison for swindling more than 60,000 Muslims out of about $65 million with a scam centered on pilgrimages to Mecca. A court outside Jakarta on Wednesday handed down a 20-year sentence to Andika Surachman and an 18-year term to his Muslim fashion designer wife, Anniesa Hasibuan. Her sister, Kiki Hasibuan, was sentenced to 15 years over the same scam. “The defendants … are proven guilty of committing [a] perpetual scam and money laundering,” judges at the court in the…

A financial professional has become Hong Kong’s biggest victim of internet romance scams, losing HK$14 million (US$1.8 million) to a con artist she had an online relationship with for eight years, police sources revealed, amid a surge in such cases this year. Online romance scammers duped 119 Hongkongers to the tune of HK$75.9 million in total in the first three months of this year, five times more than the amount for the same period last year. A police source described the eight-year con as the longest-lasting online love scam in…

Three Hong Kong tourists will be deported from Thailand for allegedly making a false robbery report in order to claim HK$60,000 in insurance money. Cheuk Kai-hay, 26, Chui Tsz-kwan, 24, and Wu Ching-bor, 23, have also been slapped with two-year suspended prison terms and blacklisted from entering Thailand, South China Morning Post reported. The trio reported the alleged “robbery” at Thung Mahamek police station on Saturday, claiming that a tuk-tuk driver made off with their belongings, namely three iPhone X units, two cameras, and THB45,000 (around US$1,400), as they were returning to…

Today Your Voice Asia is making a public notice as a matter of urgency. One of our subscribers to our pan-Asian publication has provided us with a detailed account of a horrific experience with what must be the most blatant theft of obtaining money by deception we have reported to date. In 2016, a couple from Singapore made their first overseas holiday home purchase. Nothing makes the hearts of a couple warm more than to know they’re on the way to buying their retirement home. Retirement savings were put into…